About Dave Bayless

Dave is a “business midwife” who gets energy from helping people innovate in and through their human scale businesses. As a former private equity investor and lender, he helped make more than $500 million in capital commitments to finance growth, acquisitions, and recapitalizations. As part of entrepreneurial teams, Dave has helped raise more than $30 million of equity capital. He's also worked in product development, innovation management, manufacturing, and administrative roles.

Daniel Mack and Marco Billmaier met in primary school in Germany. Over the years, they often discussed going into business together. A personal loss sparked the insight that led to the launch of Mementi Urns three years ago. It combines the seemingly incongruous aspects of street art with the funeral urns business.

With the introduction of Shopify Flow and the Wholesale Channel, Shopify Plus will help accelerate and transform business. By reducing the barriers to commercialization and learning faced by niche producers and specialty retailers, Shopify Plus will increase the incentive and opportunity for merchants to continue to sharpen their market focus.

Julia Spehlmann wears many hats. She earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing from UMASS Amherst in 2013. Julia is currently a full-time student at UMASS Lowell pursuing an additional degree in Computer Science. She is also the co-founder of The Little Collar. Julia handcrafts each Little Collar wristband. Each one sold represents a day of food provided to a dog in need. She is passionately driven by a ferocious love of man’s best friend and her unrelenting desire to save and feed as many dogs as possible.

Sometimes we receive feedback in the form of beliefs or conclusions that can be difficult to reconcile with our point of view. In this episode, Laura Black and Dave Bayless explore a technique for decomposing such high-level feedback into the data and meanings that inform it. In the process, Laura introduces the “Ladder of Inference” and the OODA Loop.

We all have blind spots. Seeking feedback from people having complementary perspectives will accelerate learning. Such collaborative learning requires a commitment to mutual respect, a focus on valid information, and informed choice and volition.

Over the course of several episodes, Laura Black and Dave Bayless, co-founders of Human Scale Business, discuss giving and getting feedback in order to accelerate entrepreneurial learning and achieve your goals faster with less effort.

Kyler Russell plays Little League Baseball. He’s also a product developer and co-founder of a growing business. What started out as a craft project in his family’s dining room has evolved into the field-tested, kid-approved Comfy Cup™. “In this case, we just wanted to make sports safer and more enjoyable for boys,” says co-founder and […]